Beyond Armageddon: Book 02 - Empire

by Anthony DeCosmo

  “Choke the bastards,” Gordon Knox jumped in. “Cut em’ off and choke em. Just like the Nazis at Stalingrad.”

  Trevor nodded his head in agreement.

  Brewer presented more specifics. “General Shepherd has proposed an ambitious plan to take out both of those depots while we encircle the retreating enemy. Encircled and without supplies we can then reduce them with artillery and whatever air power we can muster. Think of it, eight thousand Hivvans surrounded and cut off. We could wipe them out.”

  “Oh, that is being wonderful,” Omar spoke. “But how can we possibly do such a thing? Our supplies are low as it is!”

  Knox said, “Think. The Hivvans have about seven thousand more troops garrisoned in Columbia. If the forces retreating from Raleigh make it back to Columbia then we’ve got a real dogfight on our hands when we get down there. If we can cut them off and destroy them then taking Columbia becomes a lot easier. Take Columbia and you free more than ten thousand human slaves and you break the back of the Hivvans in the Carolinas. They would have to withdraw all the way to Atlanta.”

  “It would shorten this phase of the war,” Trevor simplified. “Save human lives and free more slaves. In the long run, it would mean fewer supplies needed to get the job done.”

  Brewer continued with the details. “Shep proposes to send Stonewall’s 2nd Mechanized Division along I-95 and into South Carolina. They will first occupy Dillon then head toward the coast to hook up with the second branch of the attack, which will be Shepherd’s own 1st Mech Division. He will lead them down I-40 to Wilmington then hang a right to follow Route 17 until he gets to Conway. At that point the trap would close; the Hivvan army would be cut off.”

  Knox enlightened them, “Intelligence indicates no large, organized forces in Wilmington, just animals as well as some human groups who have carved out small sanctuaries in different neighborhoods. General Shepherd’s group could actually bypass the city proper. We could then send Hunter-Killer groups to take care of Wilmington and secure the force’s rear area and supply lines.”

  “Sounds simple, Gordo,” Dante sneered.

  “It is, Mr. Jones. It is. We just have to tough it out.”

  Reverend Johnny boomed as he spoke directly at both Trevor and Jon Brewer. “Praise the Lord, your ambition burns hotter than Lucifer’s kitchen. Can such a feat be done? Perhaps your reach exceeds your grasp.”

  “Perhaps,” Trevor answered. “Either divine intervention or luck has given us an opportunity to deal a fatal blow to our enemies. If we can move these two armies quickly, we can cut off our enemy and destroy him at a relatively small cost. But the effect, Reverend, would be catastrophic for our opponents.”

  Brewer added, “You have to remember, the retreating Hivvans abandoned ammunition and supplies when they ran out of Raleigh, and now they are on bad ground. The roads are thin and in poor shape, the terrain around those roads is wet or dense or both. Their movement will be restricted. It will take them days just to reconstitute. After that they will rely on those supply convoys either to retreat or counter attack. No matter how you look at it, take out those depots, surround the Hivvans, and they will whither and die.”

  “Looks like a race,” Brett pointed out. “Wait now. Yep, that’s what it is. It’s a race to get those two pincers into position before the Hivvans can get out of the trap. I’m guessing if we win that race, they die. But if they get out of the noose then we’ve gone and wasted a heck of a lot of materials. Gee, not only that, our boys would be in bad shape to fend off a counter attack.”

  “What kind of time frame we looking at?” Lori Brewer asked

  Her husband answered, “We think we can complete the encirclement in a week or so, depending on what type of smaller hostile forces we encounter.”

  Anita Nehru offered her insight on that matter. “You’ve got a lot of swamps down there. Great hangouts for Deadheads, Snake-Beasts, and Giant Skip-Beetles. Even though the Hivvans are reptilian, we know they don’t like swamps or even the wilderness in general, not unlike us.”

  Trevor said, “It’s going to take them time to get organized. They are under constant harassment and their lines of communication are sketchy right now. I think Stonewall and his unit did an even better job of whacking them than we first thought.”

  “Right. I suspect you’re going to need a ton of fuel, a heap more in ammunition, and a couple of warehouses worth of food for all this,” Stanton said.

  Trevor voiced what they all thought: “That means diverting more from civilian stocks. That means putting distribution people in Raleigh right away. It means more head aches and a lot more screaming from Eva Rheimmer.”

  Dante Jones said, “Our supplies are at the breaking point right now. If this doesn’t work, we’ll be in a world of hurt.”

  “People, this is a tremendous opportunity,” Trevor told them. “If it works, then we’ll have time to get caught up on the internal stuff because the Hivvans will be beaten all the way back to Atlanta. Throw in Jon’s northern expedition and the next few weeks could determine the outcome of this war. Some may ask, why take this risk? Why push things too hard? I say fortune favors the bold. I say there is a reason why we have learned of these runes. There is a reason why one of our most clever enemies has made such a foolish mistake. Maybe it’s destiny. Maybe it is a higher power keeping watch on us. Maybe dumb luck. Whatever it is, we would be fools if we did not act. I have faith that we can get it done because I have faith in you people.”

  He glanced around the room at his lieutenants, gauging them; looking at their hearts. As he did, he filled them with confidence. He had, after all, led them to victory after victory. This was the man—the leader—who had told his defeated, worn forces at the Battle of Five Armies that they could win by charging a better armed, more numerous opponent. He had been right.

  “What better way to introduce us to the world than to embark on two fantastic adventures? Let this be our formal introduction. Let our enemies know that there is no power greater than us. No greater power than The Empire.”

  5. Opposing Views

  “A politician, Proteus-like, must alter

  His face and habit; and, like water, seem

  Of the same colour that the vessel is

  That doth contain it, varying his form,

  With the chameleon, at each object’s change.”

  —Mason

  Evan sat at the head of his own conference table. Certainly not as grand as the council chambers, and the authority he exuded not as dominating as Trevor’s authority. Nonetheless, his followers were as loyal as Stone’s cronies.

  A half-dozen of them gathered at Evan’s table in what had once been the editorial offices of The Citizen’s Voice newspaper in downtown Wilkes-Barre, just outside the zone of rubble left from the Redcoat bombardment nearly five years before.

  “So what have we got for tomorrow’s edition?”

  Evan meant, of course, the next issue of The New American Press: his own newspaper, distributed in several cities via hard-driving couriers.

  A young man with thick glasses and wearing a plaid shirt pulled a batch of loosely organized papers from a folder and offered a checklist of sorts. “Um, well, we’ve got the page one story on Raleigh and a sub-head working the over-extended angle. Then there’s directional headers that will lead people to the nuclear reactor waste issue at Three Mile Island then—”

  “What’s the Raleigh story? What’s the angle?”

  An older man with broad shoulders dressed in an Oxford University polo replied, “It’s a two-pronged story that interviews a couple of soldiers who complain about the lack of front line supplies, that forces are stretched too thin—that sort of thing. Then we got a witness who says it was a human artillery shell that hit the slave camp on the northeast side and killed ten people. The military claims it was a Hivvan Battlebarge, but they’re lying.”

  “Wait, just wait,” Evan held a hand aloft. “Exactly what is it this article is going to imply? Is it slanted aga
inst the war? Is that what I’m hearing?”

  The guy with the glasses and the guy in the Oxford shirt both nodded.

  “No, no that’s not right. How the Hell can anyone be against this? How can anyone sitting here be against the idea of freeing human slaves? Of saving our fellow human beings?”

  Like most at the table, the Oxford-shirt-wearing-man cocked his head in confusion and said, “I thought, well, I thought we were against the war.”

  “Jesus, we are not against liberating humans. We’re not against freeing slaves. That’s ridiculous. You start running blanket criticisms against the war and people will throw our paper away and dismiss us as a bunch of crazies. I have not worked this hard for this long to get thrown away. Not when we’re primed to really make a difference.”

  A middle-aged woman with long strawberry blonde hair and a deep scar across her face where a Devilbat had slashed her years before spoke for everyone else at the table: “I don’t get it. We ran the story in the last issue about mayoral appointments and how a couple of those bozos managed to really screw things up. We also had the piece on the supplies lifted from the orphanage in Albany and sent to 2nd Mech and how that left a bunch of underweight kids starving. So how are we not against this war?”

  “We aren’t against this war,” Evan insisted. “Anyone here who is against the idea of freeing slaves and saving human lives can get off their ass and leave my newspaper now.”

  No one dared move.

  Evan carried on, “What we’re against is how this war is fought. We’re against people being freed without enough thought given to how we are going to take care of those people. We’re against these massive offensive operations if they take food and heating fuel and medicines away from the civilian population. Most of all, we’re against the fact that none of us has a say in what is happening and why.”

  Evan, in a move he learned from watching Trevor, made eye contact with his entire editorial board, one at a time. Some nodded in agreement; others looked away.

  “Paul,” Evan spoke directly to a skinny thirty-something fellow with a pencil stuck behind his ear and a bushy mustache above his lip. “I don’t ever want to see another one of your cartoons linking Trevor with Hitler. I know why you did it and it was funny but we have to remember that most of the people out there feel they owe a debt to Trevor Stone. They see him as sort of a King Arthur; sure, he’s a dictator but he’s tough in the way people like their leaders to be tough. We need to back off the personal attacks and focus on his tactics and the mistakes his underlings make. When we attack him, we’re attacking the guy who saved mankind. Instead, let’s attack the goofs he handpicks to make decisions. Let’s start asking questions there.”

  A mumble of agreement circled the table.

  “Questions like, why didn’t anyone negotiate with the Hivvans before attacking Raleigh? What if we could have found a way to free those people without losing so many soldiers? What if we hadn’t assassinated the regional governor last year and instead opened a dialogue with him? Or it. Whatever. You get the point.”

  “What about the nuke story?” the young man with thick glasses and the plaid shirt asked.

  “That’s good. That’s exactly what we want. We want to show that some of these decisions are not thought through. Where is the waste going to be stored? Are there enough skilled technicians to run the plant? Is the plant in good shape? That’s a great story.”

  The Oxford-shirt guy volunteered, “You know, we still have that story about the lack of vaccinations and shortages in antibiotics. We didn’t have the space to run that one last time.”

  Evan remembered Dr. Maple’s good news about increased production and recently-discovered stockpiles of vaccinations, antibiotics, and other medicines.

  “Um,” Evan stumbled. A voice in the back of his mind whispered that he should run that story and detail how many lives would be saved by this development. But another voice—the one in the front of his mind—reminded him that his newspaper was not in the good news business. Good news did not serve his purpose. Not yet, at least.

  “Let’s shelve that one for now.”

  The strawberry blonde girl asked, “Do you want us to do a piece on the people freed in Raleigh?”

  “No. Not yet. Give it six months. By then, the time those people spent in bondage will be a fading memory, but blackouts, shortages, and all of the problems here will be on the tips of their tongues. In the meantime, I have another story brewing. This one is big. Jamie,” he caught the attention of a young girl with curly red hair and one of the largest chests in the brave new world. “Start pulling records. I want hard stats and a timeline on military deaths during the last year as well as Internal Security and food distribution deaths.”

  “What is it you’re looking for?” the Oxford-shirted man inquired.

  “It may be that we’re losing more people behind the front lines than we are on the battlefield. That makes the perfect point; we’re expanding too quickly without enough thought given to infrastructure, food, health care, and all that.”

  Jamie nodded as she scribbled notes.

  “What about your editorial?” The woman with the scar asked. “Is it done?”

  “I had one done. It was about the need for a modern constitution and congress. I think I’m going to shelve it until Jamie gets me those stats. That might be the best way to go.”

  The thick-glasses-wearing man broke in, “Hey, that gal from the TV station will be here any minute. You’ve got an interview.”

  “Oh yeah,” Evan remembered. “How do I look?”

  “Butt ugly,” the scar-faced woman said.

  Laughter erupted around the table.

  –

  “Is this good?” Evan asked as he adjusted his tie, ran a hand through his brown hair, and wiggled his chair a little to the left as per the cameraman’s directions.

  The cubicles, tables, and desks of the paper’s newsroom served as backdrop with the staff firmly instructed to appear busy but avoid any noise that might reach the microphone.

  In a chair next to Evan sat Angela West, a woman—like Evan—in her early thirties. The dark roots hinted her blond hair might not be natural and the thick make-up surrounding her smile suggested she remembered a few tricks from the news business of old.

  While giving his tie and hair another good straightening, Evan made small talk.

  “How long have you been with the National Broadcast Network?”

  “I’ve been with NTN since we started in Harrisburg last year.”

  He knew the answer but asked anyway, “You have outlets in Pittsburgh and Baltimore now, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Baltimore is still at low power though, not much of a signal. We have couriers, though, who run tapes to the independent stations that are popping up all over the place. Our interview today will probably be seen by at least half the free population.”

  “That’s great,” he finally found satisfaction with the knot in his tie. “I’m just surprised you wanted to talk to me.”

  “Mr. Godfrey, you’re a member of the governing council and at the same time run what could fairly be called an ‘opposition’ newspaper. If that’s not an interesting interview, I don’t know what is.”

  “Please, call me Evan.”

  “Are we ready yet?” she asked the cameraman.

  “I’m rolling in three…two…one…”

  “Evan, you began The New American Press almost two years ago. Why did you get into the newspaper business and how would you describe your editorial slant?”

  “Well, Angela, history has taught us that a free and independent press is a critical component in ensuring human rights, the rule of law, and in pushing for equality and dignity for all people. The more media outlets we have with participation from as many people as possible then the more likely we are to build the type of society humanity deserves.”

  “I see,” Angela accepted the first part of his answer.

  “As for editorial slant, I think that’s t
he wrong description. We do have an agenda. Our agenda is to bring to light as much information as possible—good and bad—about what is happening in the world, what the future holds, and to offer alternative ideas.”

  “Would you consider your paper more liberal or conservative?”

  Evan vigorously shook his head. “Angela, I don’t believe those terms hold any meaning in this new world. My editorial board includes people who, in the old world, were left-wing activists as well as what politicos would have considered neo-conservatives. In the past, those types of people were diametrically opposed, but both shared a fundamental belief in representative government, a free economy, and an open society. Issues that would have divided these groups in the past—issues like social policies and programs—are simply dead right now.”

  Angela nodded politely but let him speak.

  “Instead, many of yesterday’s political groups find themselves drawn together by a common cause; the cause of improving life here within the boundaries of what is now officially being called The Empire. A name to which I am vehemently opposed, by the way.”

  “So despite the fact that you were personally appointed to the governing council by Trevor Stone himself, you are opposed to much of what his government is doing?”

  Evan offered a gentle smile.

  “I’d have to disagree with what your question infers. Know that I have been fighting alongside Trevor since the early days. Indeed, I consider Trevor a friend and I will always remember the day when he led a rescue party that saved my life. I would also mention that I fought alongside him at the Battle of Five Armies and was a part of his forces when the infamous battle for Wilkes-Barre took place.”